Purdue's president, Mitch Daniels is an enemy of “academic freedom,” say a chorus of professors, because as Indiana governor he sought to prevent the use in public classrooms of historian Howard Zinn's books. Zinn, who belonged to the Communist Party USA, saw himself not as a historian but as a propagandist for what he considered leftist progress. “Objectivity is impossible, and it is also undesirable,” he once bluntly stated.